This dramatic view of the center of the Orion Nebula is the home of a grouping of hefty, young stars, called the Trapezium Cluster. Several hundred stars are sprinkled throughout the image. Many of them appear red because their light is being scattered by dust.

Supernova 1987A was discovered in 1987 within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way. The bright ring around the central region of the exploded star is composed of material ejected by the star about 20,000 years before its demise. Clouds of hydrogen gas surround the supernova, fueling a firestorm of star birth.

To mark Hubble's 26th birthday, astronomers captured this party balloon-like sphere of gas being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. The Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, is caused by hot gas escaping into space from a star 45 times more massive than the Sun.

Spiral galaxy NGC 6503 is in a lonely position, at the edge of a strangely empty patch of space called the Local Void. The Local Void is a stretch of space at least 150 million light-years across that seems completely empty of stars or galaxies. Dark dust lanes snake across the galaxy's bright arms and center, giving it a mottled appearance. Bright red patches of gas can be seen scattered through the galaxy's swirling arms, mixed with bright blue regions that contain newly forming stars.

The heart of the giant globular star cluster 47 Tucanae reveals the glow of 200,000 stars. In this cluster, Hubble spied a parade of young white dwarfs starting their 40-million-year migration away from the core. In globular clusters, lower mass stars rob momentum from more massive stars. Heavier stars sink to the cluster's core as their orbits slow, while lighter stars pick up speed and move across the cluster to the edge.

Hubble's 25th anniversary image features a giant, sparkling cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina.

Hubble revisited its iconic "Pillars of Creation" image with this sharper and wider view of pillars in the Eagle Nebula. The towering pillars are about 5 light-years tall, bathed in the blistering ultraviolet light from a group of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust.

The Monkey Head Nebula (also known as NGC 2174) is a star-forming region in which bright, newborn stars near the center of the nebula illuminate the surrounding gas with energetic radiation. The cloud is sculpted by ultraviolet light eating into the cool hydrogen gas.

Hubble's 20th anniversary image shows a mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. The top of a three-light-year tall pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas that stream from the peaks.

This image, released for Hubble's 17th anniversary, shows a region of star birth and death in the Carina Nebula. The nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun.